Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Well, even large angry people get to take holidays. I returned, yesterday, from Durham. It's a small city with a fucking ridiculous number of hills over a short horizontal distance. It's a rather picturesque place, although it seems to be plagued by joggers.

I spent time with friends in the pub - now, I do this in Edinburgh too, but it is a group of friends I don't see often enough, and obviously it was a different pub. A change of scenery, and all that.

One morning I pottered around in the Botanic Gardens, which had a nice soothing effect on me. I came across a giant water lily. Next to which, they had a picture of a small child sitting on a giant lily...

Something like this:

(I gleefully plundered that image from the interwebs). Conveniently, there was a mother with small child sat at the entrance to the hot house where the lilies were, so obviously I asked her if I could borrow her small child to sit on a lily...

Needless to say, this did not go down too well, so this is the best I could do:

Anyway, whilst in that neck of the woods, my friends and I went to Diggerland! (Watch out, there's annoying muzak on that site. Bastards.) I was driving a JCB, which was brilliant.

Well worth a visit - for kids of all ages. One of the gang was doing so well at digging holes, the chap told him to fill it back in... I was amazed at some really small kids being allowed to drive some fairly large plant around the site... Don't tell the Health & Safety fascists.

So, with all this done, I headed back to Embra yesterday morning on the National Express East Coast service, first class, natch. I had to evict someone from my seat, which was a pain, but then, I had gone to the trouble of reserving the seat, and he was clearly a chancer. There's always one. That and there wasn't nearly enough coffee served on the train back home.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

I was at Leuchars on Saturday there to see XH558 fly. That's a Vulcan bomber, for the people who don't follow this sort of thing... Possibly the last chance to see her.

Sadly, the weather was shite. As a result, the Vulcan did not fly due to not enough V for VFR. Just as well there wasn't a war on or anything. Bastards. How did this country ever manage to be great?

I did see the Red Arrows though. Again.

And whiles the Red Arrows are great, it's not as if we haven't seen them before - they do get around you know?

I was bitterly disappointed, nay, raging fucking mad, that the Vulcan wasn't allowed to fly. pesky weather and civil rules. Damned uncivil if you ask me. They did at least allow her to taxi up to rotation speed, which was nice, since the noise that the Rolls Royce Olympus engines make would make you think that God was angry.

I was last at Leuchars when I was a wee boy, so this was still a fantastic day out, even with the gash weather, and I'll certainly try to get along again next year.

Friday, September 05, 2008

I was reading the Metro this morning, as I was suffering my daily drag to work on the trains, and read the article on pg 4 about Wendy not being banned from the wee pretendy parliament.

So, the (low) standards committee recommended that she be barred for 1 day for failing to register the donations she received to her leadershit campaign.

The pretendy parliament then voted 70 to 49 to not ban her for 1 day.

Wendy describes the result as "a victory for the law, for natural justice and for common sense".

I can't believe the cheek of it. She's sucking down OUR tax money as a public servant, fucking us by not playing by the rules, and she has the cheek to tell us that was a victory for the law? Common sense in that place has been sorely lacking for a hell of a long time.

In my rather angry opinion, a victory for natural justice would be that cunt swinging from a lamppost.